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Artist
Tom Rapp
12+ albums
folkpsychedelic folkamericanacoustic70s
about
Tom Rapp (Thomas Dale Rapp, March 8, 1947 – February 11, 2018) was an American singer and songwriter, best known as the leader of Pearls Before Swine, the psychedelic folk rock group of the 1960s and 1970s. He later practiced as a lawyer. Born in Bottineau, North Dakota, United States Tom Rapp's parents were both teachers. As a young child his family moved to Minnesota, where at the age of six he was given a guitar. A neighbour taught Rapp some chords, and he also learned to play the ukulele. He once came third in a talent contest in Rochester where a certain Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing was fifth. "The winner was a cute little girl in a red sequined costume who twirled a baton." The Rapp family moved from Minnesota to Pennsylvania before settling in Melbourne, Florida in 1963. There, Tom Rapp formed Pearls Before Swine with three high school friends in 1965. They recorded first for the ESP-Disk label, and then for Reprise. Rapp said that "We never got any money from ESP. Never, not even like a hundred dollars or something. My real sense is that he (Bernard Stollman) was abducted by aliens, and when he was probed it erased his memory of where all the money was". By the time of the third Pearls Before Swine album in 1969, the other original members of the group had left, but Rapp retained the group name for recordings. At this time, Pearls Before Swine did not exist as a performing band. The next three Pearls Before Swine albums, The Use of Ashes (1970), City of Gold (1971)
